Quoted in Gabriele Tarde’s Laws of Repetition: “Scientific knowledge need not necessarily take its starting-point from the most minute hypothetical and unknown things. It begins wherever matter forms units of a like order which can be compared with and measured by one another, and wherever such units combine as units of a higher order and … Continue reading Repetition of conceptions
A note on word choice: I am experimenting with using the word “conception” in place of “concept”. A conception is a conceiving move that produces a concept. A concept can be one of any number of artifacts, all of which can be viewed as alike in that they are produced and reproduced (comprehended) by the … Continue reading Reconceiving conceptions, part 1
When people ask me what design research is, my favorite answer is “precision inspiration”. I know this might seem slightly business romantic, but my meaning is exact, clear, concrete — even a bit technical. * I’ll start by explaining what research is pragmatically, in terms of what it does. And because I’m a business guy, … Continue reading “Precision inspiration”
Yesterday, Nick freaked me out about the existence of Anne-Marie Willis’s paper “Ontological Designing”. I was so distressed about possibly being scooped, and also about the state of my current project — a distress possibly biologically amplified by an infected eyelid — that I barely slept last night. I was dreaming about this stuff. Today … Continue reading Anne-Marie Willis’s “Ontological Designing”
Over the weekend Susan pressed me for details on how an enworldment can be intentionally changed. How does enworldment design differ from Stoicism’s mental toughening-up exercises, or new age self-helpers who advise us to tell ourselves a new story? It was helpful to be forced to get concrete, and to make some contrasts with transformational … Continue reading Differentiating enworldment design
As preparation for writing my next book, tentatively titled Enworldment (A Philosophy of Design of Philosophy), I’m indexing the articles I’ve written on approaching philosophy as a design discipline. Some of the earlier articles have a blunt simplicity to them that I want to recover, at least for the introduction. I’m going to list some of … Continue reading Enworldment
A philosophy should be: Understood as an instrument that is adopted and used (instrumentalism) Expected to disappear in use and become a ready-to-mind producer of self-evident truths for its user Designed with a subjective user experience (perceiving, understanding, anticipating, responding) as its primary purpose and mode of being, and its objective forms (presentation, argument, vocabulary, etc.) serving as a … Continue reading A possible outline for my book
NOTE: I’ve converted this article into a page, and I will not be updating this article in the future.
Susan and I have been having very fruitful arguments over the universality of ethical principles. We’ve been spiraling in on what it is exactly that makes me actively pro-religion, but hostile — almost panicked — toward so much of conventional religious thought. Below is an edited and slightly expanded version of a series of texts … Continue reading Transcending the axial religious worldview
Reading Schutz’s observations of the “intentional gaze” I am realizing how important the concept of intentional mediation as a means to extend our intentionality (both active and receptive intention) is to my own thinking. This is the sentence that sparked it: However, as I am always interpreting these perceptions as “body of another,” I am … Continue reading Intentional extension
The word “concept” is ambiguous. In casual use we tend to treat a concept as the object of conception: an idea we can present to others. But we will also use it in ways that suggest a capacity to conceive. For instance, in math, a teacher will present a concept to a student in multiple … Continue reading The concept of concept
Ancient Greece gave us the concept of philosopher-king. The classical 18th century contributed the image of the philosophe, the philosopher-liberal. The romantic 19th century created the ideal philosopher-poet. The rationalist 20th century specified many species and sub-species of philosopher-specialist, each with its own technical vocabulary, incomprehensible outside its own specialized discourse. I hope the 21st … Continue reading Philosophical images
DISCLAIMER: This post is a big mess (which is why it’s been hidden from November 2020 until today March 31, 2021), but it’s got a lot of good, useful stuff in it, so I’m making it public. ================= In the winter of 2002, I developed a new life-changing habit. I began waking up early in … Continue reading Design Pragmatism
I move around in a world of enworldments. When I meet a person, their enworldment is what I am trying to intuit. When an artifact — object, environment, artwork, anything — attracts my attention, it is because it implies an enworldment with a person at its center. At times I’ve wanted to call a particular … Continue reading Enworldments
I’m not sure what happened to Ezra Klein between his infamous 2018 spat with Sam Harris and the publication of his book this year, but it seems to be a move in the right direction. During his debate with Harris — especially toward the end as mutual frustration heated it up — he continually accused … Continue reading Ezra Klein’s evolution
I am looking in my anomawiki for a quote from Nietzsche about foreground and background philosophies. I am digging through one of the themes I’ve catalogued, “depth“, and noticing — somehow for the first time! — how many of these quotes involve water, and specifically cold water. Reading Nietzsche I slowly discovered a symbolic language … Continue reading Foregrounds and backgrounds
Joseph Campbell’s most famous quote, “follow your bliss”, might really have been a careless remark of an old man well past his prime. For years I refused to take Campbell seriously, and even posed him against an antithetical motto, “follow your angst.” But reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I do not see any … Continue reading Joseph Campbell (and some weird rambling)
Working in design research, empathy is one of our primary tools. Reflective practitioners quickly learn where they and their teammates have strengths and weaknesses using empathy to produce understanding. Continuing this week’s trend of identifying distinctions and creating categories, here’s a list of skills associated with what is commonly called “empathy” and what I prefer … Continue reading Facets of empathy
When thinking about truth, we expect both clarity and effectiveness. These qualities are so expected, in fact, that they serve as criteria for truth. If they are present we assume what we think is true, and if we are surrounded by people thinking the same way we might even succumb to certainty. Certainty is comfortable. … Continue reading The odor of burning rubber
From Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects: The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory spearheaded by Bohr holds that though quantum theory is a powerfully accurate heuristic tool, peering underneath this tool to see what kind of reality might underlie it would be absurd because quantum phenomena are “irreducibly inaccessible to us.” “Powerfully accurate heuristic tool” jumps out of … Continue reading Eureka